By John Freeman August 15, 2001

Patricia Highsmith was born in Texas, which seems fitting somehow: The only territory more murder-obsessed than her native state might be the one created in her imagination. Highsmith's fiction teems with untoward deaths. Hapless victims are felled by rifle butts, blows to the head, strangleholds. One unlucky Frenchman suffers the indignity of being stomped to death by his enormous, truffle-hunting pig. Such wicked demises have attracted directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Minghella to Highsmith's singular oeuvre. What Minghella couldn't... More >>>